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Naming and Forgetting Sowa Rigpa and the Territory of Asian Medical Systems

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Naming and Forgetting Sowa Rigpa and the Territory of Asian Medical Systems ARTICLE Naming and forgetting Sowa Rigpa and the territory of Asian medical systems Sienna R. Craig and Barbara Gerke Abstract Sowa Rigpa is generally translated as ‘the science of healing’ and often used synonymously for ‘Tibetan medicine’. Historically, Sowa Rigpa can be considered a borrowed term from Sanskrit, accompanied by an adopted sense of ‘science’, which initially signified all forms of medicine known to the Tibetan world, regardless of their place of origin. Over the centuries, Sowa Rigpa became linked to local, indigenous, and ‘enskilled’ practices; later, to nationalist political sensibilities; and of late to cultural belonging. The term evokes territoriality, claims to ownership of knowledge, concerns over sustaining national identities, and considerations about how place-based healing practices and material resources relate to the globalizing ideas about traditional Asian medicines. Textual and ethnographic analyses and interviews with practitioners from China, India, and Nepal show how Sowa Rigpa exists at once as a marker of shared intellectual and cultural histories and forms of medical practice and as a label for a globally circulating medical system with distinct interpretations. Looking at Sowa Rigpa as operating in de- and reterritorialized global spaces makes visible how, why, and to what end modernity forgets (Connerton 2009), thereby allowing for broader conclusions applicable to other medical contexts. Keywords Tibetan medicine (Sowa Rigpa), Asian medicine, globalization, recognition, identity, naming Medicine Anthropology Theory 3, no. 2: 87–122; http://doi.org/10.17157/mat.3.2.350 © Sienna R. Craig, Barbara Gerke. Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. 88 Naming and forgetting For the sake of living beings, the emanations of the Sugata [Buddha] taught the preparation of medicine in India, cauterization and channel cleansing in China, mainly bloodletting in the land of Dolpo, pulse and urine diagnosis in Tibet, the Science of Healing Collection [gso dpyad ’bum pa] to the gods, the Caraka Aṣṭavarga to the Rishis, the Black Iśvara Tantra to the ‘non-Buddhists’, and the Guardian of the Three Lineages to the Buddhists. All these [medical teachings] are included in this medical tantra [Four Treatises]; there is no medical practice not within it. The Great Compassion has no partiality, but things appear according to individual disposition. Just as a single moon in the sky appears as individual moons in every water urn, one teaching was delivered but many were understood. – [Desi] Sangye Gyatso (1982b, 67/6–18), quoting Yuthog Yönten Gonpo (1982, 660/6–14)1 I think it is better to use the classical term Sowa Rigpa for amchi medicine in Nepal. The nomenclature matters a lot in [the] longer term. – Dr. Padma Gurmet, director National Research Institute for Sowa Rigpa, Ladakh, India, advising Nepali practitioners on paths to national recognition (e-mail message to Craig, September 2015) The subaltern groups are tied also to specific places, but their ties are to the particularity of local settings, rather than a lifestyle potentially available to the hegemonic group everywhere. – Paul Connerton (2009, 133) Introduction Much can be said about the work of naming – what it accomplishes and what it elides.2 The process of deciding upon a name for something such as a form of medical practice is an act 1 See also translation by Kilty 2010, 86–87. Medicine Anthropology Theory 89 of classification that can have high stakes in terms of knowledge ownership, contested identities, and belonging within and beyond nation states. Naming practices are exercises in power and legitimacy, even as the meanings of names can change over time. In this article, our object of analysis is Sowa Rigpa (gso ba rig pa). Often translated as ‘science of healing’, this term is now viewed widely as a synonym for ‘Tibetan medicine’, not only by a range of practitioners and institutions in Asia but also, increasingly, in academic literature and in the global circulation of therapeutic practices derived from Asia. This collaborative piece of scholarship in fact resulted from our individual academic experiences of having to define these terms in each paper we write, becoming actors ourselves in the global dissemination of terminology and the politics of naming. Our frequent discussions and own decision-making regarding the usage of Sowa Rigpa versus Tibetan medicine in academic publications inspired and urged us to write this article. Although Sowa Rigpa has come to be synonymous with Tibetan medicine, it has meant different things to those writing and speaking in Tibetan and related languages over the centuries. As Fjeld and Hofer (2010-11, 177) point out, ‘Before the twentieth century, there was little need to identify the diverse bodies of Sowa Rigpa knowledge, practice, and experience as either Tibetan or ‘traditional’; they were simply referred to by Tibetans as ‘medicine’ (sman) or as ‘sowa rigpa’. Throughout the article we distinguish these two uses by capitalizing Sowa Rigpa when it stands for the formal name of a medical system, as with Ayurveda or Traditional Chinese Medicine, and use it in italicized lower case as sowa rigpa when we are discussing it as a multivalenced term in circulation. In this article, we explore major trajectories in the transformation of sowa rigpa as a term, and ask what this says about Sowa Rigpa as a medical system. We understand this medical system to be a broad collection of practices that are neither homogenous nor closed but that share textual orientations and epistemological grounding (see Pordié and Blaikie 2014; Gerke 2011; Schrempf 2007; Samuel 2008). We examine the etymological and sociohistorical roots and transfigurations of this term in Tibetan medical texts, in the self-representation of contemporary institutions both within and beyond Asia, in its usage among practitioners themselves, and in the context of academic discourse. In doing so, we aim to address the following questions: What encompasses rigpa – a word often glossed as ‘science’ but that 2 This paper is dedicated to Dr. Pema Dorjee (1950–2015), a medical scholar-practitioner trained at the Men-Tsee-Khang in Dharamsala; former director of the Men-Tsee-khang branch clinics in Kolkata and Salugara, West Bengal, India; and the first chairperson of the Council of Tibetan Medicine in Dharamsala from 2004 to 2007. Dr. Pema Dorjee dedicated his tremendous skills and energy to the cultivation of Tibetan medical knowledge across generations and to the alleviation of human suffering. 90 Naming and forgetting might also be translated as ‘field of knowledge’ – in a Tibetan context? What is meant by sowa, ‘healing’? When did Sowa Rigpa come to mean ‘Tibetan medicine’ and how has the term been used in the promotion of this medical tradition in national and transnational contexts? And what does this tell us about the politics of naming and about the larger changes that medical traditions in Asia undergo when their names are popularized or used for political or even commercial ends? We explore how the use of ‘foreign’ terms, for example the Sanskrit ‘vidyā’ or the English ‘science’, have underlined certain types of authority in the process of naming – in this case as Sowa Rigpa has come to be used not only synonymously with but also more visibly than Tibetan medicine. We also link these inquiries to debates on cultural memory. Following Paul Connerton (2009, 2011), we ask: what forms of ‘forgetting’ must be employed so that the meaning of a name can be transformed over time, toward distinctly contemporary goals, even if done in the name of preserving ‘tradition’? The transformation of sowa rigpa as a term has involved turning a vernacular concept in the Tibetan language into an idiom that sounds ‘authentic’, perhaps even ‘exotic’, when used in English-language contexts or in global situations, by Tibetan speakers and non-Tibetan speakers alike. By ‘vernacular’ we mean a formal technical and literary term that is also used in common speech. As one of our peer reviewers pointed out, a similar dynamic has occurred with Ayurveda and Yoga. At the same time, sowa rigpa has come to reflect political concerns, from the loss of territory and national identity among diasporic Tibetans and constrained forms of ethnic autonomy within the People’s Republic of China (PRC) (see Glover 2006) to the politics of ‘Tibetanness’ in national or regional contexts such as Nepal, Mongolia, or Ladakh, India – places where the medical practice flourishes among people who are not, as such, ‘Tibetan’. As a form of strategic essentialism, Sowa Rigpa exists as the label for a medical system that is experienced in diverse ways and places yet still affectively, morally, and textually linked. At the same time, the term allows practitioners to connect this label to certain concepts of citizenship and what it means to be a doctor these days. It is a term that seemingly transcends the nation state even as it is also bound up with struggles for national recognition, and, simultaneously, is becoming visible on the global stage. As such, we are interested not only in tracing the historical roots of this term but also in describing how Sowa Rigpa has come to occupy powerful virtual and global spaces, even at times becoming like a brand. We argue that the use of this term makes possible forms of ‘virtual’ belonging among practitioners, even as forgoing ‘Tibetan medicine’ for Sowa Rigpa may be disquieting to some practitioners. By ‘virtual’ we do not exclusively refer to Internet connectivity, even though the Internet and social media increasingly play a significant role in sowa rigpa-related communication, but primarily to a sense of belonging that is not bound to territory or nationhood but that is tied to shared epistemologies of practice, shared concerns Medicine Anthropology Theory 91 about access to materia medica and desires to produce efficacious medicines, and shared moral frameworks, rooted in Buddhism (Blaikie et al.
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